The April Music Haul

Alright, so this entry might be a bit short as it'll only be focusing on the music I bought during April.  The closing Blockbuster Video store is still open for a few more weeks so I'll wait until then for a final tally before I write about that.  But I surprisingly bought quite a bit of CDs for a good price (yes, people actually purchase physical media still) so here's a look at the stuff I've been listening to as of late.

Technically, I bought most of this stuff at the end of March so I could've fit it in my March haul but decided against it, especially since I'm not the greatest describer of the music I listen to anyway.  When I checked my email in the last couple days of March, I got one from The Omega Order, a mail-order distribution that specializes in metal and is the main distribution for the label The End Records, who include some of my favorite bands like Mindless Self Indulgence and Dir en grey in their roster of bands.  Normally, I tend to pass over these emails so as not to blow all my money, so much so that they've made their way into my spam folder.  But this time they were running a special April Fool's sale that I couldn't turn down: 70% OFF the entire order and a free random t-shirt.  The Omega Order run pretty good sales every so often but this is the best I've ever seen.  And I mostly wanted to see what random shirt I would get.  Would I get a badass Darkthrone logo shirt or would I get some random corny hair metal band shirt?

I ended up getting a shirt from the band Early Man.  It took a few minutes to figure out the logo and realize the design on it was two sharks and not some weird tribal facepaint but it'll be a cool thing to wear every once in a while and see if any other metalhead notices.  (It's the same design showcased in the YouTube video below and the cover for their "Beware The Circling Fin" EP.)  As for the band themselves, Early Man reminds me of The Sword, only more thrash oriented, and come fully recommended by me.



Now onto the actual CDs, the first one was Dir en grey's live CD/DVD titled "UROBOROS - with the proof in the name of the living...".  I'm a big fan of DEG but I've kinda been on the fence when it comes to their live shows.  Singer Kyo's voice can do a lot of things on record that he can't necessarily achieve live on a regular basis so it can be a bit disappointing to listen to.  And even then, live shows are meant to be seen, not just listen to.  Thankfully this comes with a DVD of their 2-hour long show at Nippon Budokan on 1/10/10.  The DVD has twice as many songs but there are a few songs on the CD that aren't on the DVD so it warrants a listen but the way it's edited is so disjointed with no flow between songs that it's only worth listening to about once.  The live DVD, however, is great.  Focusing mostly on the Uroboros album, the first half of the concert is rather mellow and subdued but just when you think you've been lulled into a false sense of security, they ramp up the intensity and throw some older songs into the mix.  And with light show and video screens, I'd take this show over a stoned-out Tool concert anyday.



Then I got "Don't Say We Didn't Warn You" by Does It Offend You, Yeah?  Anyone who read my last blog post knows I had just gotten their first album "You Have No Idea What You're Getting Yourself Into" and it's kinda more of the same, but better.  I don't really know how to explain it, there are a few songs that are more techno-y, some that are more slow and thought-out, and one that sounds like they stole it directly from Muse.  Either way, they're still one of the more energizing bands I have in my personal collection and I'd suggest them to anybody who wants something that should be on pop radio but isn't.



The final album I bought was "Agorapocalypse" by Agoraphobic Nosebleed.  Again, in my last haul, I bought another album of theirs, their second "Frozen Corpse Stuffed With Dope" but since then the grindcore gods have released numerous EPs and splits, upgraded their drum machine, added a female vocalist (who kills, by the way) and wrote longer songs.  Now, doing a three minute song might not be that big of a deal but when your band's average song before that point is about 30 seconds or less, being able to maintain that same level of blast beats and brutality for a longer period of time takes a lot of work.  It's like having sex at a fast pace but still trying to last longer.  In that regard, Agorapocalypse is the Tantra of grindcore.



Recently, MetalSucks.net declared Scott Hull as the #1 Modern Metal Drummer despite, you know, not actually playing the drums.  Lots of metal fans were quite butthurt but I thought it was a ballsy move.  Agoraphobic Nosebleed's drum tracks simply can't be played by a human drummer.  A half-human, half-octopus drummer possibly, but not by a person.  And due to the advancement of technology, Scott Hull has somehow made the impossible possible.  But on the other side of the coin, the allure to an Agoraphobic Nosebleed track is that it's not possible to be played, and when it sounds possible, that allure is missing.  The drum tracks sound so real that you almost forget that they're actually not, which is an achievement but then you tend to take them for granted when you're not quite paying attention.  I don't know, maybe that's just me.  But I will say that's literally the ONLY gripe I have with Agorapocalypse.  And naming Scott Hull as metal's current top drummer is way better than Spin naming Skrillex the 100th greatest guitarist of all time.  Seriously Spin, you really don't know 100 people that play a guitar?

In the end, I got 3 CDs and a t-shirt from The Omega Order for the grand total of...$15 AFTER shipping.  That's insane!  It was practically $3 a CD before shipping.  I was tempted to buy more but I'm kinda glad I stopped myself when I did.

But that's not all.  Later on in the month, I ended up getting another CD from my local used record/game/movie store in the form of "Morbid Destitution of Covenant" by Father Befouled.  I mostly got the album by name value alone, remembering it from a bunch of year-end Best Of lists for 2010 and ended up liking it, as Father Befouled sound mostly like a slowed-down doom-y version of Mortician.  It's standard '80s-style death metal, in all honesty.  And I only spent $5 on it for a new copy, mostly because I traded in a few DVDs for store credit and couldn't find anything else I particularly wanted that day.



So there you have it.  I'm going to have to restrain myself more, especially now that I just realized the new Cattle Decapitation album "Monolith of Humanity" comes out in just a couple days.  I also want to pick up "Silentium Amoris", the new album from William Control, but I believe the only way to buy it is directly from him off the web as he doesn't have a record label this time around, so it'll probably be a little while before I get my hands on that.

Oh yeah, in non-music stuff, I bought Iron Monkey on Blu-Ray for $5 at Wal-Mart.  Because it's Iron Monkey and it was $5.  I almost want to see if Iron Monkey 2 would ever get a Blu-Ray release, considering it's quite possibly the worst martial arts film I've ever seen.  And believe me, I've seen some stinkers.